Against Magical Legal Thinking, or: Why the WHO Pandemic Agreement is an expression of the problem, and not the problem itself
My post on the WHO Pandemic Agreement provoked two criticisms. The first is that I did not address the proposed amendments to the International Health Regulations of the World Health Assembly. The second is that my reading of the Agreement was altogether too naive, and specifically that I overlooked the potential for vaguely worded aspirational provisions to become pretences for hygiene tyranny.
As for the first critique, I can only plead that the IHR amendments are a related but fundamentally separate topic. I wrote about the Agreement because many readers asked me to, and now that many also want me to review the IHR amendments, I’ll do that too.
For now, I’ll say this: In their current form, these amendments appear to be an even worse trainwreck than the Agreement, plagued by bizarre typographical errors and imprecise phrasing that makes interpreting them very difficult. A lot of this text will have to be substantially revised before it can be adopted, but the upshot is clear: As was the case with the last round of amendments in 2005 inspired by the SARS outbreak, the present revisions aim to expand the autonomy of the WHO and its capacity to manage the international pandemic response. With every virus scare, the global pandemicist cabal gains more confidence and power, and this is why pandemics and the declaring of them are very bad.
On the other hand, the amendments and the Agreement have much the same animating spirit. We experienced the Corona era as a hygiene dictatorship that infringed upon our fundamental freedoms, but our international minders regarded especially the vaccination campaign as a failure of their third-world agenda. They are less interested in lockdowns and in vaccinating every last German than they are in attenuating things like intellectual property rights for the purposes of directing more free pharmaceutical products at our expense to the global south. These innovations in international law are 80% shake-down, in other words. That is also very bad, but it could be worse.
As for the second critique: I have a rather different perspective on laws and treaties than many of my critics. Specifically, I try to avoid Magical Legal Thinking.
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